Fairlight Desktop Console Review
By Randy Bobo, Founder, Independent Studios
Blackmagic Design‘s Fairlight Desktop Console is an audio mixing control surface designed for DaVinci Resolve’s Fairlight audio post page. I may examine this new bit of kit differently than most. Let me explain.
I’ve been in the audio post world for forty years (and I’m only 37, ha!), and for more than half of that time, I’ve used Fairlight products to record, edit and mix films, TV and streaming shows and commercials. I know and love Fairlight as an audio editor.
Now, along comes this little thing called COVID-19, and all of a sudden I have to work from my home. My kids are grown and out of the house. My wife’s textile studio is upstairs where the kids use to be, so the living room was ripe for the taking. Now, I couldn’t really move one of our Fairlight EVO consoles from the studio to my living room given its large size, so I took the opportunity to jump with both feet into DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Fairlight page.
As a small sidebar, Blackmagic Design acquired Fairlight in 2016 and began incorporating it into DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci Resolve Studio, its post production software. While I had been (and still am) using a pre-Blackmagic Fairlight EVO system, Blackmagic Design has been tinkering away over the years since the acquisition, not only improving and adding to the dedicated Fairlight page in DaVinci Resolve, but also developing and updating things on the hardware side too.
I’d been using DaVinci Resolve Studio a bit for about a year, knowing that it would be the next big upgrade when we retired the EVOs, but I hadn’t taken it seriously. Now with COVID-19 and working remotely from home, I had to.
With iMac in hand, I set up my little mixing space in my living room. Fireplace behind me, big window looking out on the yard, wonderful. In a short amount of time, I was accomplishing all the tasks I normally did at the studio. Maybe not as fast, but the results were good, the workflow was doable, and the clients were happy. My staff was all safe in their homes, and all of us were working. It was Spring of 2020.
When the reality set in that working remotely was going to be a long-term solution rather than a short-term fix, I reevaluated my workflow. Enter the Fairlight Desktop Console.
If you’ll permit me another sidebar, I’m very familiar with the Fairlight Audio Editor, which is part of the EVO console I previously mentioned. The Fairlight Audio Editor is a dashboard that houses an LCD screen, control knobs, macro buttons, keyboard and more. In its current Blackmagic Design iterations, it comes as the Fairlight Console Audio Editor (as the name implies, it’s intended to be part of a full console) and Fairlight Desktop Audio Editor (standalone desktop model). If you’re interested in learning about the different models and their features, Blackmagic Design has a dedicated Tech Specs page on its website.
Back to the Fairlight Desktop Console. It was time to put it through its paces. The installation was so simple, I couldn’t believe it. Plug and play. No kidding, it worked right out of the box.
To quickly run through the specs as advertised by Blackmagic Design, the mixer has 12 motorized faders, touch-sensitive encoder knobs and illuminated buttons. The console’s controls can be used for functions including pan, solo, mute, dynamics, EQ, plug‑in parameters and more. Each channel strip LCD displays meters, panning, track name and more. An HDMI output provides graphic feedback for all channels, bus and effects from the desktop console.
I started to edit with it but soon gave up. Yes, you heard that right. It has all the editing features I needed, but I was so use to the bigger Fairlight Audio Editor that my fingers were just not going to the right places. At this point, I was faster with a mouse and keyboard.
In the middle of all this, I took on the editing, sound design and mixing for a narrative podcast. I told myself to get out of my rut and give the Fairlight Desktop Console another try, since editing these stories was a task. There were hundreds of edits and wasn’t the purpose of the console to increase efficiency? Muscle memory be damned! The Fairlight Desktop Console worked great, and by the end of the first episode, I was pretty comfortable with its editing functions.
This isn’t really fair, I know. I believe if I hadn’t used the Fairlight Audio Editor for twenty years, the Fairlight Desktop Console’s editing features would have felt great from the start. Some of the editing features are handy, but I don’t think this is where the console’s strength really lies. It’s really the mixer that shines.
I dove into my next project, “Magnificent Madness,” a four-part documentary which tells the story of Piero Dusio, Tazio Nuvolari, Ferdinand Porsche, Benito Mussolini, Evita Peron, World War II and a car. Well, several cars. I would be doing all the post audio, including editing, sound design and mix, in DaVinci Resolve Studio.
Surprise! The Fairlight Desktop Console is a fabulous little mixer. I mixed all four hours of the documentary solely on it. I’m talking Stereo and 5.1 mixes and stems all at once. It works like a big, grown-up board, just in a more compact and portable desktop size. It even has external monitor capability, so you can really keep an eye on everything the Desktop Console is doing. EQ, dynamics, busses, plugins, etc. – pretty much everything can be controlled via this console. There is even a jog wheel!
Fast forward to the present, and I’m now back at the studio. However, I have set up the Fairlight Desktop Console-based workflow I had in my living room in my office/mixing room, replacing my EVO. I’m not looking back.